The plan was starting to feel like another one of Cecily’s failed great ideas.
As they drove through the newer subdivisions, Mel tried to imagine exactly what “home” was going to look
like. Before long, they were in an older neighborhood, with big trees and narrow streets.
“Four more blocks,” Cecily said, as though she was counting them down. “One left turn, then a right, and we’ll see Frohberger’s, and then one more block and we’re home.”
Mel noted that it was the third time Cecily had used the word
home
.
“Frohberger’s?” Mel asked.
“Yeah, the corner store. Mr. Frohberger was your grandpa Tux’s best friend. It was the two of them that came up with the idea to do the Saturday Magic Matinees in the back of Frohberger’s store.”
“Did I ever go to the shows?” Mel asked.
“No, it was back when I was a kid. But you know the coin trick where I pull a quarter out from behind your ear?”
Mel nodded. She was enjoying this rare event. Cecily was talking about the past and about their life with Gladys and Tux.
“Well, Tux used to do that trick for you with a bouquet of bright, orange plastic flowers.”
“That’s funny,” Mel said.
“He was funny; I’m amazed you don’t remember him.”
“I wish I did,” Mel said as she looked out the window. It seemed to her that if there had ever been a time to ask the question, the time was now. “So did I live with Gladys and Tux for a long time?”
“No, just sort of off and on. It’s not like you lived with them all the time or anything.” Then Cecily added, “They were just helping me out through some tough times.” She paused. “If I’d known that Tux was sick, I wouldn’t have left.”
Mel didn’t know what to say.
“I wonder if Mr. Frohberger is still alive …” Cecily said more to herself than to Mel. “I probably owe him an apology also.”
It was something Mel liked about Cecily: that even though Cecily made mistakes, and she made a lot of them, she would apologize.
Cecily pulled the Pinto up to the curb and stopped. “Here we are.”
“Wow, it’s huge,” Mel said, gazing up at the three-storey building.
“Oh, don’t get your hopes up; Gladys’s apartment is right there,” Cecily said as she pointed up to the second floor. “You see those two windows?”
“The windows that have the tinfoil on them?” Mel asked.
“Ah, yeah. I don’t remember the tinfoil. But anyway, the one on the right, that’s the kitchen window and there are two bedrooms and a bathroom off the kitchen. The bathroom is by far the best part of the apartment. The window on the left is part of the living-room-slash-entry. The bigger window next to that is the hallway to Gladys’s front door.”
Mel noted that it was the only one of the three that didn’t have tinfoil. “Are you sure Gladys still lives here?”
Mel asked, sizing up the neighborhood. “Maybe she moved, or maybe she’s at work …” Mel said quietly, thinking of all the possible reasons Gladys wouldn’t be there.
“Probably not at work,” Cecily answered as she leaned out the window and looked up at the apartment building. “It’s after two in the afternoon, and I suspect she’s still working at Fan’s Dry-Cleaning – she starts work at six-thirty and is home by two, one-thirty on short days.”
“Really, do you think she’s still doing the same job?” Mel asked.
“I don’t know what else she’d do,” Cecily said as she got out of the car. She leaned down and butted out her cigarette on the sidewalk, and then tucked the remaining bit back into the tinfoil pouch inside the package. “The place is looking a little rougher than I remember,” she said.
Mel wondered why they had waited so long to come home. Why was it Cecily refused to talk about Gladys and Tux? What had suddenly changed? She was definitely curious, but she didn’t ask. This was the closest they’d ever come to going home, and she wasn’t going to do anything to stop it from happening. She hoped that being here would spark her memory of the first three years of her life.
The building’s exterior wasn’t as nice as she’d imagined it would be, but nor were any of the other similar
buildings that lined both sides of the street. Most had peeling paint, and the gardens were overgrown with weeds; some buildings had broken windows fixed with tape and cardboard.
As they walked along the sidewalk to the front door, Mel was careful not to step on any cracks in the concrete. It wasn’t easy: there were tons, and they were all connecting and interconnecting. One line of a nursery rhyme repeated itself in her head as she tiptoed.
Step on a crack; break your mother’s back
. Cecily paid no attention to the thin crevices. Mel wished she would.
There was an intercom on the wall outside of the door, and a list of names that had been punched out of blue plastic – the kind done with a labeling machine. Many of the small, gray buttons didn’t have name tags. Cecily didn’t push the button next to the name Tulley; rather, she pulled on the door and it opened.
“This thing hasn’t worked for years,” Cecily said as she looked back at Mel and proceeded up the staircase. At the top, the hallway went in two opposite directions. Cecily turned left. They walked four steps and then made a right and continued down the hallway. Gladys’s apartment was at the end, next to the window Cecily had pointed out from the Pinto.
Mel followed, looking for anything that might seem
familiar about the rough plaster walls or high ceilings. She had decided on the way to Riverview that she would call her grandmother Grandma, the proper name for a grandparent (and not Gladys, the name Cecily used). With each step, she recommitted to that idea.
“You knock,” Cecily said as she backed away from the door.
Mel took in a deep breath, stepped forward, and knocked. The sounds of a TV filtered through the varnished wooden door.
“Louder,” Cecily whispered.
Mel knocked again, this time striking the door with enough force to make her knuckles hurt, but the pain only fueled her excitement. Someone lowered the volume on the TV. Cecily motioned for Mel to knock again. Mel’s heart began to pound.
“Who’s there?” a woman called out from behind the closed door.
“Is that you, Gladys?” Cecily asked.
Standing purposely tall and perfectly still, Mel held her breath and kept her hands at her sides.
When Gladys didn’t answer, Cecily spoke again. “It’s Cecily,” she said as she gave Mel a nervous smile and
a little poke with her elbow. “Say hi,” she whispered.
Mel took in a small breath, and, on the exhale, whispered, “Hi.”
Still nothing.
Mel could still feel her heart beating against the inside of her chest, but the excitement had turned to nervous dread. She looked out the window; she could see the top of the Pinto parked out front.
“Gladys!” Cecily called out. And then, in an even louder tone, added, “It’s Cecily and Melody! We’ve …” Cecily paused. “We’ve come for a visit.”
“Go away!” Gladys shouted back. “There isn’t anything left in here for you to steal!”
Cecily seemed to ignore Gladys’s statement. “Look!” she said as she pulled Mel in front of her and stared directly at the small brass peephole in the door. “I’ve got Melody – you know, your granddaughter.”
“Let’s go,” Mel said, undoing herself from Cecily’s grasp.
“Gladys! Open … the … door!” Cecily yelled.
She waited a moment, but there was no response.
“I was hoping,” Cecily said in a much calmer voice, “that Mel and I might be able to stay, maybe a day or two, while we looked for a place of our own.”
A place of our own
, Mel repeated in her head.
I thought
we were coming here to be home
. “I’m trying to get back on my feet.” Cecily quickly glanced at Mel and then continued, “No drugs, no booze.”
Still, there was no response from Gladys.
“Look, I can understand you not wanting to see me, but what about Melody? What’d she ever do to you?”
Mel could taste the rage building in Cecily’s words. “Let’s leave,” she pleaded.
Cecily ignored her and began pounding on the door with both fists. In this way, Mel and Cecily were different; when things went wrong, which they inevitably did, it was Mel who needed to stay calm and think things through with hopes of counterbalancing the anger in Cecily’s quick temper. But in many other ways, they were the same: thin and fine-boned, agile with long, slender hands. Cecily wore her hair in long, straight braids, unlike Mel’s tight-knit, copper-colored curls. Her curls were the one thing, she believed, that she got from her father – whoever he was.
“That’s it,” Gladys yelled. “I’m calling the cops!”
Mel heard what sounded like a chair or table being pushed up against the door. Moments later, the volume on the TV was turned up another notch or two.
“The grand total of all that crap in your jewelry box … thirty-five bucks, Gladys!” The TV volume cranked
again and was now so high that Mel was sure that Gladys wouldn’t hear her no matter how loud Cecily yelled or pounded on the door.
“That’s it! Thirty-five bucks! You act like I pawned the queen’s jewels or something!” As Cecily yelled, she reached into her coat pocket, pulled out the last of the little money they had left, threw it, and then kicked the door. “There, I hope this makes you happy!”
Two fives and a ten lay on the floor.
“You heard her,” a young guy said, poking his head out from his apartment door down the hall. “She said to leave her alone or she’s calling the cops.”
“Shut up!” Cecily yelled back at him.
“And if
she
doesn’t,” the guy added, “I will!”
“I’m going to the car,” Mel said, and then she turned and began to walk down the hall. As her feet descended the staircase, she could feel a rubbery looseness in her knees. She let everything she’d hoped this day would bring tumble down the dusty and scuffed wooden treads of the stairs. What remained was a cold, empty hole in her stomach.
Cecily continued yelling at Gladys as she stomped down the stairs behind Mel, and she continued yelling all the way out the front door. Then she stood on the parched remnant of a lawn, two floors down from
Gladys’s apartment, and yelled up at the closed window.
Mel got into the Pinto and prayed to a god she didn’t really know.
Please make Cecily stop, get in the car, and drive away
.
“I should have known it wouldn’t work,” Cecily yelled half in Mel’s direction and half at the apartment building. “We’re better off on the street.”
Mel couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The street was where they had been before moving in with Craig. They’d slept in shelters, they’d sung for handouts, and panhandled on street corners.
How could we be better off on the street?
“If Tux were alive, he would never have done this, Gladys!” Cecily shouted as she shook her fist in the direction of the window. “He wouldn’t have turned away his own
flesh
and
blood!”
Cecily took her cigarettes out of her bag, lit the half-smoked butt, and blew a steady stream of smoke in the direction of the window as though waiting for Gladys to yell back. When there was no response, Cecily turned and marched to the car.
Cecily no sooner started the car than she shut it off, jumped out, and ran back into the apartment building. Mel turned her head purposely away and looked in the direction of Frohberger’s. The store, with its fresh,
grassy-green paint and cream trim, was the best-kept building on the entire street. It was the image, in many ways, that she’d held in her heart of what Gladys’s was going to look like.
When Cecily returned a few minutes later, she looked exuberant. “Got there just in time. That’ll teach her for not opening the door,” she exclaimed as she held up the cash, started the engine, and sped away.
For Mel, there was no exuberance because she knew now that they were definitely
not
going home.
They drove for what seemed like hours, traveling up one side of the main street and back down the other, five maybe six times, then along the river, through other neighborhoods, and then back into the downtown. Cecily played tour guide, nostalgically pointing out the bars and restaurants of her old hometown, but it was obvious to Mel that Cecily was looking for someone she knew. They returned time and time again to a public phone booth, where Cecily made several calls but got no answer.
“And look, Mel,” Cecily said as she gave Mel a little jab. “They have a library – four floors of books, a pretty nice place for a town this size.”
Mel didn’t look. Nor did she say anything; instead, she continued to lean her head against the edge of the
open window and watch as the streetlights flickered on above the Mission Soup Kitchen. The thought of the library only reminded her that Craig had probably gone back to the house, and that he’d probably found her journal.
She looked into the shops and houses they drove by. Warm light glowed through softly colored curtains. She could almost smell the sweet aroma of summer barbecues, but it only added to the doubt that anything so good could ever be hers. There were no words for the feelings lost inside of her, just emptiness.
Cecily drove them to the edge of town, and then she slowed the car to peer into the darkness for a campground sign. Suddenly a distinct hissing noise, one that appeared to be coming from under the dash, brought Mel’s eyes back into the car; a caution light was blinking. She was about to point it out to Cecily when smoke began billowing into the air from somewhere under the hood.
Cecily pulled the Pinto wagon to the edge of the road and began a tirade. She got out, kicked the tires, lifted the hood, and slammed it back down. It wasn’t the first time water had come spewing out from the radiator and bubbled over onto the engine. What was different this time was the goop leaking out the bottom onto the road.
Cars drove by – some slowed. Mel hoped someone
would stop. But that was unlikely, especially with Cecily yelling at the car.
When Cecily calmed down, Mel asked, “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Cecily answered. “But for now, we need to get this piece of junk off the road.” Mel steered while Cecily pushed the car over a grassy area onto a patch of old asphalt, which was next to a pillar under an overpass that was, for the most part, out of view of passing cars. With the Pinto parked, they dug out their clothes and draped them like curtains over the car windows. Mel lit Cecily’s cigarette lighter and held up the flame so Cecily could find the bag of bread in the back. Cecily tore each of the two remaining pieces in half, undid the lid on the peanut butter, and scraped what was left from the edge of the jar with the bread, making them each a sandwich.